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The majority of male Ricks College students, while serving as missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, spend two years living in geographically unfamiliar environments. This thesis compares the geographic literacy of those Ricks College males who have served LDS Church missions with those who have not. A test of geographic literacy was administered to 306 male Ricks College students. Returned missionaries demonstrated significantly higher knowledge of general cultural and physical geography than pre-missionanes. In contrast, returned missionaries demonstrated no greater ability to identify global places such as countries and cities. As expected, the returned missionaries possessed a superior knowledge of the regions in which they served.

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This dissertation examines the ways in which non-urban spaces were approached as objects of knowledge in Argentine and Brazilian essays, chronicles, and films in the 1960s. It is comprised of three case-studies. The first traces the role of spatial coordinates in 1960s' political imagination, reconstructed through programmes for economic modernization (developmentalist agendas and the Doctrine of National Security), through Frantz Fanon's thirdworldist understanding of political organization, and through Gunder Frank's version of Dependency theory. The second study centers upon Brazil's rural Northeast as evoked in Antônio Callado's chronicles and economist Celso Furtado's memoirs, that both simultaneously took up and challenged the terms by which developmentalism's mainly technical modernization sought to legitimate itself. The third case-study begins with the national horizon envisaged for Argentina by economist Rogelio Frigerio's apology of industrialization as an agent of social homogenization. This horizon is then contrasted with two investigations on marginal spaces: Fernando Birri's documentary film "Tire dié" and Roberto Carri's essay in which, by defining a new space, the "area of colonial capitalism," Carri brings to the fore novel forms of political action. I situate each case-study at a crossroads between developmentalist hopes and blossoming liberation movements, demonstrating how each resignifies differently national and transnational coordinates. Critical theories of space, as well as intellectual history and discourse analysis constitute my readings' methodological base, guiding my analyses of aspects that are often overlooked in studies of 1960s culture, particularly as regards the constitution of militant subjectivities and trajectories. Inspired by David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre's theories and methods, I detect the constant presence of a technified prism in the spatial imagination of modernization, be it social or economic. I argue that the descriptive activity by which these marginal spaces are produced as objects of knowledge is also poetic as it approaches these decaying spaces from the vantage of a present defined by hopes in technical modernization as an agent of progress. As such, this descriptive and poetic activity amounts to a complex political intervention that articulates such spaces in function of specific temporalities and rhythms, rethinking critically their relation to imperialism and to capitalist modernization. / Dissertation

Several commentators have argued that the focus within political theory in recent decades on abstraction rather than 'reality' has left it with has nothing to say to political actors. On these grounds, some have even expressed concern regarding the discipline's future. As a reply to these concerns, I introduce in this thesis the scholarship and political career of the Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari. Cacciari shares many goals with Anglophone political theorists, but neither his scholarship nor his practice have engaged in the kind of intellectual abstraction which they now find so troubling. Drawing from Cacciari's philosophy, political career, and interventions as a public intellectual, I show how his understanding of real-world conflicts and contradictions begins with a commitment to what I call his 'geophilosophy of the archipelago', which regards the foundations of human knowledge to be irreducibly plural. A commitment to irreducibly plural foundations means that philosophers and political actors must discard what Cacciari views as 'enchantment' with the possibility of ultimate or absolute resolution of all political discord. In return, however, he argues that hopeful political engagement is still possible, because political actors remain able to cope in material and semiotic terms with the complex realities they face. I suggest that serious consideration of Cacciari's example of recognising irreducible plurality, coupled with a disenchanted engagement with both the material and the semiotic dimensions of political life, offers a compelling alternative orientation to the world that may suggest new ways forward in political theory.

published_or_final_version / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

The thesis explores the reception of the works of the Scottish Enlightenment in provincial Scotland, broadly defined, aiming to gauge their diffusion in the libraries of private book collectors and 'public' book-lending institutions, and to suggest the meanings and uses that contemporary Scottish readers assigned to major texts like Hume's History of England and Smith's Wealth of Nations. I thereby acknowledge the relevance of more traditional quantitative approaches to the history of reading (including statistical analysis of the holdings of contemporary book collections), but prioritise the study of sources that also allow us to access the 'hows' and 'whys' of individual reading practices and experiences. Indeed, the central thrust of my work has been the discovery and interrogation of large numbers of commonplace books, marginalia, diaries, correspondence and other documentary records which can be used to illuminate the reading experience itself in an explicit attempt to develop an approach to Scottish reading practices that can contribute in comparative terms to the burgeoning field of the history of reading. More particularly, such sources allow me to assess the impact that specific texts had on the lives, thought-processes and values of a wide range of contemporary readers, and to conclude that by reading these texts in their own endlessly idiosyncratic ways, consumers of literature in Scotland assimilated many of the prevalent attitudes and priorities of the literati in the major cities. Since many of the most important and pervasive manifestations of Enlightenment in Scotland were not particularly Scottish, however, I also cast doubt on the distinctive Scottishness of the prevailing 'cultural' definition of the Scottish Enlightenment, arguing that such behaviour might more appropriately be considered alongside cultural developments in Georgian England.

This project explores a curious facet of early cinema that has not been studied as yet: the relationship between Turkish modernity and the culture of spectatorship within the context of the late nineteenth century’s viewing habits along with the era of early and silent cinema in Istanbul. The aim of this project is to examine the evolution of viewing habits in Istanbul at a particular period in which a radical cultural transformation was experienced, namely from the 1890s to the 1930s, when the late Ottoman era with its pre-cinematic shows, the cinematograph, and silent films led to the early Turkish Republic and the end of silent cinema. In order to cover the shift in the reception of early cinema, this study makes use of revisionist works on early cinema and on modernity in Ottoman history. To this end, newspapers, novels, memoirs and consular trade records that formed the majority of the primary sources of this project are analyzed. The transformation of Istanbulite spectatorship was initially experienced through a rupture in the late nineteenth century created by the global flow of mechanical images. The cinematograph was viewed by a multi- ethnic public that was accustomed to seeing both traditional and other more widely recognized pre-cinematic shows such as the shadow play, public storytelling, dioramas, panoramas and magic lanterns. At first the early cinematograph displays were haphazard and parts of other shows. Yet, the international influence of the early cinema attracted a curiosity-driven public even if the same public was critical of the imperfect technology of the apparatus. With the outbreak of World War I, nationalist resistance played a role in the reception of popular European films, particularly Italian melodramas. The end of the war caused the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the foundation of the Turkish Republic, after which, cinema started to be seen as an educational tool in the service of nation-building.

鄒重華. / 本論文於1997年12月呈交. / 論文(博士)--香港中文大學歷史學部, 1998. / 參考文獻: p. 209-219. / 中英文摘要. / Ben lun wen yu 1997 nian 12 yue cheng jiao. / Available also through the Internet via Dissertations & theses @ Chinese University of Hong Kong. / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / Zou Chonghua. / Lun wen (Bo shi)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue li shi xue bu, 1998. / Can kao wen xian: p. 209-219. / Zhong Ying wen zhai yao.

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